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Yoast SEO 9.6: Improving our code

We’re still recuperating from an awesome edition of YoastCon last week, but that won’t keep us from releasing a new version of Yoast SEO. Yoast SEO 9.6 is a bug fix release with an additional focus on improving the code base of the plugin to better adhere to coding standards. Find out what else is new in Yoast SEO 9.6!

A reminder: The beta test toggle will be removed

Testing the new SEO analysis — due for release in Yoast SEO 10.0 — has been a great success. More than 100.000 people are helping us test the new version in real-world situations. We are in awe of those numbers — thanks everyone! All this input will give us enough feedback to improve the new analysis even further before we release it into the wild some time from now. Read more on this beta test in the release post of Yoast SEO 9.4 or find out why you should help us test.

In Yoast SEO 9.6, we will remove the toggle to sign up for the beta as we have more than enough participants and data. If you’ve already enrolled, you can continue using it. After the update, it’s no longer possible to sign up or to reactivate it once you’ve switched it off.

Improving Yoast SEO by using better code standards

One of the main improvements in this release of Yoast SEO is not a new feature or some bug fixes, but something less visible: better code through code standards. Together with the awesome Juliette Reinders Folmer, we’ve embarked on a journey to drastically improve the code of our plugins.

We’re in the process of discarding old standards and embracing new ones. There are lots of reason to use modern standards: from code that’s easier to maintain, to read and to debug. It leads to more consistency and a much more secure code base, hardening it for security risks. At the moment, Yoast SEO is on PHPCS 2.8.1, WPCS 0.10.0, YoastCS 0.4.3, PHPCompatibility 9.1.0, PHPCompatibilityWP 2.0.0.

This is an ongoing process that will eventually lead to a healthier and modern code base that is a joy to develop on. All of this will, of course, ultimately benefit users as well!

Other improvements

In this release, among other things, we’ve removed Schema output from 404 pages as that is not necessary. We’ve also improved the accessibility of the Search Console part of the interface, now show a 404 for empty feeds for non-existing pages (thanks Saša Todorović!) and improved our open source content analysis library (thanks Alexander Varwijk!). You can read the full list of changes in the changelog.

Update now!

There you have it. On the outside, this might seem like a rather small release but there are a lot of improvements under the hood. You might not see it, but adhering to new coding standards streamlines a code base, making it faster, easier to maintain and more secure. We’re continuing to improve our plugins in a two-weekly cycle and there’s a lot of cool stuff down the road.